


some little talk awhile

by FLWhite



Series: tetrachord: honi soit qui mal y pense [2]
Category: 15th Century CE RPF, Henry V - Shakespeare, The King (2019)
Genre: Anal Sex, Canon-Typical Violence, Ghost Sex, Halphin, Hundred years' war, M/M, aka war crimes, heatstroke, historical fuckery (again in many senses), is it my gaydar or my pleaseletthembegaydar, unhelpful medical practices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:14:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22299931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FLWhite/pseuds/FLWhite
Summary: August 1422.Henry of England, by treaty heir to the throne of France, recently triumphant in his siege of Meaux, lies suddenly stricken.*Yellow hair, long, soft, stifling, in his mouth. Scalding lips on his jaw. Hot, too hot.
Relationships: Catherine de Valois Queen of England/Henry V of England, Henry V of England/Original Character(s), The Dauphin/Henry V of England
Series: tetrachord: honi soit qui mal y pense [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1605187
Comments: 5
Kudos: 32





	some little talk awhile

**Author's Note:**

> Sort-of sequel to "oldest sins the newest kind of ways," again with Timothée and RPatt playing the leads, except this one is a smidge closer to what we know of the historical Henry's life (and death--I'm going with the heatstroke theory). 
> 
> But carefree alterations abound. It's me freestyling about power, guilt, violence, and desire. And deathbed ghost sodomy. You know, my favorite things.
> 
> Thanks as ever for reading!

***

There was a Door to which I found no Key:

There was a Veil past which I could not see:

Some little Talk awhile of Me and Thee

There seemed — and then no more of Thee and Me. 

_The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám_ , XXXII

***

"Have them bring me Remus," he tells Sutton. It is so hot; a brisk ride in plain linens, perhaps to the river, will do him and Remus both good. They don't think it safe for him to swim; some unlucky lads bathing under the bridge earlier the week had nigh been brained by a quick-handed Frenchman's stone, thrown from above. But at least to put his feet into the slow-moving cool of it, and to wet his sleeve and face and hair—it would be like Heaven. And Remus has always liked water; practically a fish in a horse's body, that one. "Sutton," he calls again, more loudly.

"Majesty," says Sutton, close at hand. What addled the man, to not have so much as squeaked, earlier?

"Sutton, fetch Remus."

There are others in his tent. Sutton is speaking with them. Someone is to have his blood let. He tries to see who but something is wrong with his eyes.

***

He blinks. It is night. They've lit but one torch, whose flame snaps and fidgets. Beneath him is a basin, with sick puddled in it; he coughs around the sourness in his throat and on his tongue but nothing else is forthcoming. His mind feels as clear and rarefied as a gem. "Water," he says, letting himself lie back. A mug appears, but he is not given it to hold; it tips gently against his mouth, like a kiss, and he sighs at the sweetness on his tongue. Only a little sip, and then it moves away. They ignore him when he asks again.

It's hard to see who holds the mug, but he is sure it is Richard. But Richard is dead. He folded the shroud around Richard with his own hands. "Richard?" He says, anyway, in case. Another idea occurs to him, and he tries it, tentatively, "John?" No answer except a cool touch on the back of his hand. Perhaps a ghost, then? He makes himself chuckle with the thought.

" _Henri_ ," says the ghost. He stops chuckling.

***

Why have they piled him with these coverlets? Or is it a body that presses on his? Yellow hair, long, soft, stifling, in his mouth. Scalding lips on his jaw. Hot, too hot. He has become aroused, and intensely; feeling stupid, he tries to shift, and is pinned the tighter for his troubles. " _Henri_ , come." His jaw is stroked, then his collarbones. The laces of his chemise hiss as they are loosened and pulled free of their eyelets.

"You are dead," he says to the Dauphin, or the man who had been. "I killed you."

The Dauphin laughs. "Am I?" The pressure coalesces unmistakably: both their members are hard and jammed together. It is not quite pleasurable. The Dauphin's limbs curl around his as though to melt into his very marrow, and he manages to swallow a moan. "Did you?"

"Yes," says Hal. "I saw your bones broken and your sword buried and your face covered in mud." His mind, sharp and bright, flies him to the scene; he hovers over it. He can see it precisely and perfectly, still, as though gazing at a painting on a wall. Himself, childish of mien but haggard from barely sleeping the night after the fight, standing over the body in the mud. Gascoigne and Cornewall and Erpingham bowing before him. He can smell it: the decay. The fading tang of blood. A very slow awareness rises through him, a sphere of air caught in oil. "Who sends you?"

"No," says the Dauphin. "You did not kill me, _Henri_."

"Worse. I let others slay for me. As I now have ten thousand times over." He sees the screaming mouths of the dust-covered women, the babies silent and hollow-cheeked, the field strewn with men and horses turned to senseless meat, at Rouen. The bloodied head of Blanchard thudding against the dirt of his own city. "Who sends you?" Knowledge seeps like black bile into his mouth. "The Devil?" But, somehow, he is not afraid. He realizes that he has expected this since the day he put his knife in Gascoigne's neck.

"No one sends me." He lets himself be kissed deeply, lets his lips and teeth be parted. The face above him is as angelic as memory. "I come to you of my will."

"Then it is as I thought," he murmurs, smiling, "you were always Lucifer himself."

"Louis will do."

***

After that once with the Dauphin before Agincourt, that night that seemed a dream and perhaps was, he'd not obeyed his resolution to find himself bedmates in the field, to avert the danger of again finding himself in the arms of the enemy.

He had contemplated it, certainly. When they returned to France on the second assault and first put the trebuchets to work on Caen, there were some pretty enough French country girls who appeared in camp, saying they sought English husbands. One or two of the knights' sons brought by their fathers to be gilt with glory but not actually sent out to the fight, too, snagged his eye with their bright hair and slow-smiling mouths, their hands quick to help unlace his helm or gauntlets. Once they entered Caen, there'd been a discreet lady who brought him a guildsman's rosy young widow, and then three or four others after she had discovered his tastes.

Not so enthusiastic, the maidens and widows of Louviers or Pont de l'Arche, or of bitter Rouen. Neither were their young men—those who lived—friendly. As he rode past the houses that stood skull-like with smashed windows and missing doors, he glimpsed them dragging out of the rutted path their broken limbs and starved bodies, turning away their battered faces.

And all the time living out of his tent, he'd refrained from any company. Some nights he'd dream of hands on him, or himself sunk into the core of a body so sweetly that he'd feel wetness both on his face and against his belly, upon waking. More often he saw his father, or John, or Thomas, or Cambridge, or Richard, standing there, smiling, unperturbed whether he tried to embrace or strike them.

And Catherine. He never dreamed of her, though on occasion he wished he could. It would be more natural, to think of the mother of one's unborn child; perhaps in dreams she would at least smile at him. He nodded when they read him the reports from Westminster: Her Majesty in good health, they thought it likely a prince, lavish baby-gifts from Philippa and Humphrey received. For a woman so delicate of frame and so warm of coloring, she is marvelous at repulsing a man. He can number the times they have shared a bed, including their wedding night, on the fingers of his two hands.

Thinking on her is like the point of a pike against his breastbone. He endures that steely chill for only a moment, though. Heat flashes through him from where his helpless body is being breached, bringing with it agonizing pleasure, and burns everything else away.

He feels newborn in the grip of these sensations: a cup perfectly filled, a scabbard neat and tight around a new-sharpened blade. Parts within him he had never known to exist are singing, and his spine trembles while his skull rings with their piercing melodies. Hair falls on his jaw and neck in sliding silky-cool pools and he laces his fingers in it, pulling, not for malice but because of an almost-obliterated memory.

" _Henri_ ," Louis giggles like a boy, and kisses him. He reaches to stroke the place where they are joined, and groans to feel it: a man in him and driving deeper, both terribly slowly and too fast to bear.

"Ah, God," he says, and tries to draw breath, but the flames inside have spread to his lungs; he coughs under Louis's dry, cool lips and softly skimming tongue, his thighs trembling with tension, until there is no more to take. He swears he hears a key clicking into its lock. "God!"

" _Calme-toi._ " Louis's hand on his head does not tug or jerk, instead stroking him as though he were a shying animal.

"No, no." He tries to sit up and finds himself pinned firm; he tries to buck his hips for more of that unspeakable sensation, but the body pressing his down into the bedclothes seems infinitely heavy. "Please." He turns his scalding face into his pillow. 

"Ah, now he is modest," Louis is laughing again. "When he almost bites my lip in two, before."

" _Please_." He blindly catches at Louis, wraps his fingers around the downy nape and presses there, puts all the weight he can into his pulling. "Please." Each catch of the withdrawing between his legs combusts stars behind his eyelids, sends blazing arrows to the tips of his fingers and toes. His mouth is open entire and he can no longer tell what manner of sounds it produces. He tips his chin as far back as it will go to let the suction of Louis's lips fall on his throat and bends his unsteady legs to brace his feet against the bed, and his heart beats and beats, and all of him quivers like he will burst with fullness. And yet he can feel himself smiling.

"It is this you wanted, my little King," says Louis against his ear, without the merest hitch of breath, nor a drop of sweat though it is so hot in the tent. "Yes?"

"Don't—" he mutters, through his involuntary gasps as the thrusts accelerate and he feels the bedclothes ruching beneath him; he drools a little onto his chin and cheek, and Louis wipes it gently away. "Don't stop."

"Never."

And then the key turns again and inside him something else yields and he feels on his prick a sliding grip that is so hot it feels frigid, or so frigid it burns, drawing him out in rhythm to the unnervingly deepening pressure within. With a sobbing cry and eyes half-shut, he comes in searing spasms, for so long that he falls asleep as his name is being called.

***

When he wakes, he thinks at first he is alone again. The suffocating heat has gone, and he shudders for it. His lips ache, his neck aches, his body aches in whole; his guts feel though they've turned to broken ice. Then he hears through the frantic tattoo of his heart many heavy footfalls, someone's rasping breath, voices muffled as though piercing deep water or a foot of stone.

He calls for more covers but none heed him. There are fingers clumsy on his mouth, prying; a small dry thing is forced between his lips. He tries to cough, but there is now a hard bit of pewter too, remorseless between his chattering teeth, trickling onto his tongue an acid drop of wine. It begins, slowly, to drown him.

"Oh, come back," he whispers, unsure whom he addresses. "Come back to me." His left forefinger seems the only piece of him still loyal to his command, and he twitches it. Around it, twined tight, he feels a single hair; it makes him smile, knowing it must be golden.

**Author's Note:**

> @zetaophiuchi(ryuujitsu) and I are plotting some sequels in a very...different register. A change of key if you will. But we hope you'll give them a read too, when they appear. And of course do take a look at our other work. If you like Henry II Plantagenet, you might enjoy the couple of Becket fics I've written, too.


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